Sometimes the barrier to employment is not the person

It is the absence of a decent opportunity to employ them.

Because employability has spent years getting increasingly sophisticated at diagnosing what is supposedly wrong with the jobseeker.

• Confidence.
• Qualifications.
• CV.
• Interview technique.
• Motivation.
• Mental health.
• Work experience.
• “Job readiness.”

Some of those things absolutely matter.

But an IPPR report published this month makes a valid point. Around 1 in 8 young people aged 16–24 are currently not in education, employment or training. Official ONS figures put the rate at 13%.

But those young people are not distributed across identical labour markets.

IPPR found that areas with higher NEET rates also tended to have fewer suitable vacancies relative to the number of young people looking for that first foothold.

That changes the diagnosis.

Because you can improve someone's CV ten times. Send them to another confidence workshop. Teach them STAR answers. Tell them to widen their search. Require another 20 applications.

But if 150 people are chasing five realistic entry-level jobs, we haven't solved the underlying problem.

We've just made 150 people slightly better at competing for five jobs.

And there is another vicious circle buried in the report.

Employers increasingly want experience. Young people need employment to get experience. So the first rung of the ladder starts disappearing precisely when somebody needs it most.

That should change how we think about employability.

There are supply-side barriers: skills, health, confidence, transport, qualifications, experience.

But there are also demand-side barriers: too few vacancies, inaccessible recruitment, employers unwilling or unable to take a chance on inexperienced workers, weak apprenticeship provision and local economies simply not producing enough entry-level work.

You cannot coach away a demand-side problem.

And I think this is where some employability systems get themselves backwards.

We keep asking: “What does this young person need to change to become employable?”

Sometimes the better question is: “What needs to change around this young person so employment becomes genuinely possible?”

• That might mean an employer changing recruitment.
• It might mean a proper apprenticeship.
• It might mean creating paid transitional work.
• It might mean health support sitting alongside employment support.
• It might mean an adviser staying with somebody after they get the job rather than disappearing the moment an outcome is recorded.

And sometimes it means admitting something uncomfortable: there aren't enough decent first opportunities in that labour market.

The IPPR report proposes publicly funded paid placements in weaker labour markets, stronger apprenticeship routes and a specialist youth employment service built around sustained relationships rather than simply monitoring job search. Those are policy proposals rather than settled answers, but the diagnosis underneath them is difficult to ignore.

Employability should absolutely help people become more able to take opportunities.

But if the opportunity does not exist, endlessly working on the person starts looking less like support and more like asking them to carry responsibility for a labour market they did not create.

You cannot make someone job-ready for a job that isn't there.

Read the IPPR report: A better deal for young people ↗